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This has been a difficult assignment. First of all, I have made several assumptions. Since the request letter refers to a book that has had the most influence in the last millennium, I have chosen something quite old. After all, how can a book written in the last several hundred years of the millennium have had the most influence on the whole millennium? Second of all, I am assuming that by "book" one can infer "text," since for the first half of the millennium (or thereabouts) there were no books per se. Third of all, I assume you mean "Western (i.e., Judeo-Christian) culture." I for one cannot speak at all to the issue of influential books in other (e.g., Moslem, Chinese) cultures. Fourth, I am excluding the Bible (i.e. Hebrew Bible and/or New Testament), post-1000 AD editions and translations of which have clearly had an enormous impact. Nonetheless, the texts contained go back before 1000, and for that reason I have ruled the Bible out.
Working from these assumptions, I ultimately decided to nominate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Written in around 1310, it had a profound influence on the language, literature, and culture in which it was written (Ariosto's Orlando Furioso was greatly influenced by the Comedy, and people in Italy still say that Tuscan Italians, unlike other Italians, speak "la lingua di Dante"). More important is that its influence was felt profoundly in all European languages, literatures, and cultures. Milton's Paradise Lost would be an early example in English of a heavily influenced work; more generally, Dante's "descent into hell," though based on Aeneas's descent into the underworld, is arguably the reason for the persistence of that mythic motif in British and American fiction. (Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the Satanic Kurtz at its dark center, owes a profound debt to The Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy.) I might add, by the way that some of Dante's lovers, their situations and their stories, make possible romantic literature as we know it from Petrarch to Emily Bronte.
Having mentioned Dante's debt to Vergil (and, I should add the Bible), I will conclude by stating that one of the reasons I chose The Divine Comedy (over, say, Machiavelli's The Prince) is because it reaches back over a millennium for its inspiration, finding it in the Bible and in a "pagan" work by an epic writer sometimes said to have anticipated the birth of Christ. So this is a text with a thousand-plus year old context as well as seven centuries of proven influence and the durability needed to ensure its influence well beyond its 1000-year anniversary in 2307.
Ross Murfin
Provost
